Francis Gooding

In​ the archives of the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, held in Bristol, you can find a neatly closing polished wooden box, inside which are half a dozen 8 mm film reels, with about fourteen minutes of footage per reel. The films were shot by Air Commodore Leonard de Ville Chisman, DFC CBE (1899-1974). They show something you almost never see: candid images of colonial warfare,...

Since​ summer 2020, orcas near the Strait of Gibraltar and around the Iberian Peninsula have been interfering with boats. Sailing boats are the most common target, and the whales use significant force on them: approaching from the stern, a group of orcas will inspect the boat carefully, swimming alongside it and turning upside down to look at the hull and steering gear, before starting to...

There have been​ two recent opportunities to see Richard Mosse’s remarkable work in London. Broken Spectre (2022), a film and series of photographs, was displayed earlier this year in an echoing, pseudo-industrial basement space at 180 the Strand; the Hayward Gallery’s ecologically themed group show Dear Earth, which runs until 3 September, includes the related but more austere...

The guns​ are aimed at everything: primary schools, restaurants, blocks of flats, offices, houses, groups of trees, playing fields, public artworks, the railway network, the river. Anything, really: less aiming than pointing wildly in all directions, a city-wide stick-up. They’re mostly antique British cannons: the reliable naval 12-pounders that were ubiquitous on...

Like​ many other important scientific inventions, the first true recipes for gunpowder were devised in China. The classic cocktail of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal was known from at least the ninth century CE, though Taoist alchemists, searching for both gold and immortality, had by then been aware of similar preparations for hundreds of years. A very early reference appears in the